Muḥammad Ṣādiq

Muhammad Sadiq Bey) was an Ottoman Egyptian army engineer and surveyor who served as treasurer of the Hajj pilgrim caravan. As a photographer and author, he documented the holy sites of Islam at Mecca and Medina, taking the first ever photographs in what is now Saudi Arabia.

Life and career

Born in Cairo, Sadiq was educated in Cairo's military college and at the Paris . He qualified as a colonel in the Egyptian army and returned to the military college to teach cartographic drawing.

In the 1870s he was given the title Bey and two decades later the higher rank of Pasha. By the end of his military career he reached the rank of liwa, equivalent to Major-General. He was briefly the governor of the Egyptian city of Arish but returned to Cairo after suffering sunstroke. He was married for 34 years; his wife died while accompanying him on a trip to Medina and is buried there. On his expeditions from 1861 to 1881, Sadiq photographed the interiors and exteriors of sites on the Hajj pilgrimage route as well as at Medina. Photographing Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (The Prophet's Mosque) and its surroundings in Medina on 11 February 1861, he noted in his diary that no one had taken such photographs before. the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Reiss Engelhorn Museum, The curator Claude Sui describes Sadiq's achievements in photography as very significant: "he sheer quality of his photographs is evidence of his talent in this field and reveals professional standards in his handling of the wet collodion procedure". Collection de Vues Photographiques de La Mecque et de Médine, 1881. This was a set of twelve photographs of stations of the Hajj, including four panoramas. Mash'al al-mahmal ("The Torch of the Mahmal"), 1881. Kawkab al-hajj fi sayr al-mahmal bahran wa sayrihi barran ("The Star of the Hajj along the Travels of the Mahmal by Sea and Land"), 1886. Dalil al-hajj li'l-warid nin Makkah wa al-Madinah ("The Guide to the Hajj for Those Arriving in Makkah and Madinah from every Direction"), 1896. All his books combine photographs and written advice for Hajj pilgrims based on his repeated visits to the area. His publications in French were a summary of his work that missed out the detail of his Arabic publications, so for a long time the non-Arabic world was unaware of his achievements.

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